December 22, 2009

Video: Lee Fennell Discusses Her Book, "The Unbounded Home"

The University News Office recently produced a short video interview with Professor of Law Lee Fennell, in which she talks about the ideas in her recent
book, The Unbounded Home. According to the book's publisher, it

grapples with a core modern reality -- that the
value and meaning of a home extend beyond its property lines to
schools, shops, parks, services, neighbors, neighborhood aesthetics,
and market conditions. The resulting tension between the homeowner’s
desire for personal autonomy at home and the impulse to control
everything that could affect the home’s value fuels continual conflict
among neighbors and communities.

The home’s
unbounded nature implicates nearly every facet of residential life,
from the financial vulnerability of homeowners to the persistence of
segregation by race and class. This book shows how innovations that
increase the flexibility of property law can address critical issues of
neighborhood control and community composition that have been simmering
unresolved for decades -- and how homeownership itself can be
reinvented to better deliver on its promises.